The Meaning of Katyn

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On this episode of How We Got Here, historian John Connelly of the University of California at Berkeley tells us about the Stalin-era massacre of 20,000 Polish officers in a place called Katyn during World War Two. The Polish delegation killed in a plane crash in Russia last weekend was on its way to a 70th anniversary commemoration of that crime. The tragedy made Katyn seem doubly cursed and underscored its meaning in Polish history and also Polish-Russian relations. Connelly recommends Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn as a good starting point for understanding both the event itself and the history surrounding it. He points out that something that’s often missed about the story is that the Polish officers were reserve officers made up of people drawn largely from the country’s elite. He says that’s part of the reason Katyn has such resonance in Poles’ memory:

Something that Russians themselves have wondered about…why in a war that consumed so many millions of victims, including 6 million Polish citizens, 3 million of whom were Jewish but 3 million of whom were not, so millions of Poles died in WW2, why were these 20,000 officers, why were they so prominent in people’s memory? It has to do precisely with this fact that these were thought of as representative of the best that was Poland: its top writers, intellectuals, professionals, political leaders and the like; that there was this attempt to do away with Poland, that the world didn’t know about it and that it was forcibly suppressed for so many years.  Only last year the Polish Parliament voted a statement labelling Katyn as a genocide, as an attempt to kill an entire people. So it’s viewed as being in some ways representative of a series of policies levelled against Poland in the 1940′s, attempting to destroy Poland.  And that’s something in a country that’s been so touched by history, where people don’t think of history as something abstract, but they think of history as something that can really determine the conditions under which you live, which can suddenly do away with the town you live in almost entirely,  the way Warsaw was wiped off the map, I mean literally wiped off the map in the 1940′s. These are things that need to be known and they need to be voiced and they need to be debated. I think if you learn more about the events surrounding Katyn…then you understand why this is something that remains alive in the Polish mind even 70 years later.

BBC Coverage of the plane crash and its aftermath